External USB hard drive for HD?

bigriggers

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Any of you guys use a USB hard drive for streaming HD footage to your 360s?

I recently bought a Freecom 400gb drive for this purpose, but it seems to be a little fussy, ie. it tends to stutter after every 20-30 seconds of footage, or when there is a lot happening on the screen.
Some footage is ok, but some is just...well, just isn't (such as the NASA night time launch)!

I know that there are different bitrates for videos, but whats the maximum you may get for a HD stream in 720p? My understanding of USB 2.0 is that the maximum transfer speed is 480Mbps which I'd have thought would be fine, although it does seem that its struggling somewhere, as the same footage is fine from my 80gb internal IDE drive.

Is there any way to test if the device is working to the full USB 2.0 speed?

Cheers!
 
Yes, I got a Western Digital "My Book" 500GB drive for mine... have had no trouble streaming hi-def video off it at all.

If you want to test the speed you'll have to hook it up to your PC I guess and run a few speed tests...
 
Hi guys, quick question with regards to external hard drives, I've got a Freecom 160Gb external hd would I be correct in thinking that the 360 will recognise any media I've downloaded onto it? I know it will see any pictures on it as I tried that a while ago, but as my 360 is up in Liverpool and I'm down in Portsmouth I'm unable to check at the mo, also what what media will it detect/play wmv, avi etc?

Cheers.
 
Yes it will also detect and play music in mp3 or wma format and movies in wmv format.
 
Yes, I got a Western Digital "My Book" 500GB drive for mine... have had no trouble streaming hi-def video off it at all.

If you want to test the speed you'll have to hook it up to your PC I guess and run a few speed tests...

I have the 250GB version of that connected to my 360.

Use the 360 to play all my mp3's via optical through my amp :smashin:

Works brilliantly.
 
I have the 250GB version of that connected to my 360.

Use the 360 to play all my mp3's via optical through my amp :smashin:

Works brilliantly.

Yes it's fantastic - love the cool blue led display too! I just wish that you could rip CD's straight from the 360 to an external hard drive instead of having to hook it up to my laptop... and that the 360 would recognise and display (or download) album art images - then it would be perfect! :smashin:
 
Cheers guys, so if I wanted to watch an AVI or DivX file would I have to download Windows Media Connect and stream them? It's just I've got a few tv shows in AVI format I'd like to watch.
 
Cheers guys, so if I wanted to watch an AVI or DivX file would I have to download Windows Media Connect and stream them? It's just I've got a few tv shows in AVI format I'd like to watch.

That wouldn't work either - you need something to re-code them into wmv format... if you do a quick search I think people have been using TVersity which can transcode divx etc. to wmv in real-time and stream to your 360. The 360 only supports wmv format video.
 
Hi guys, thanks for the responses.

A few points I should have mentioned in the original post however;

1) The drive is connected to a media centre based PC which is connected to my 360. Previously I've been streaming from my internal IDE drives which have been fine.

2) Music, pictures, divx content streams as it should - its just HD footage that I had a problem with, which leads me to believe there is a bottleneck with the drive somewhere.

Steve-L, do you know how I can test the speed of the drive, or the USB connection of the drive to the PC?

Cheers all.
 

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